And there was never a set list or a ticket charge. Or a ticket, for that matter.

See, musical Nashville is special, in large part because so many world-class musicians live within an easy drive of each other. And musicians are special.

They like what they do for a living, to the point that they’ll do it for pleasure. Plumbers don’t gather on Sundays to plumb for fun. Accountants don’t have number-crunching parties. But in Nashville, for many years, musicians gathered at the Belmont Boulevard home of famed producer Cowboy Jack Clement and at the Franklin Pike home of bluegrass legend Earl Scruggs and his wife, Louise, to laugh and smile and eat and play music.

These gatherings were joyful and casual, which is a good thing: Had they carried a whiff of formality, they would have been of terrifying weight. We’re talking about the greatest of the great, in unique conjunctions, playing together. Spouses, children and friends were invited, but the goal wasn’t to entertain the nonmusicians in attendance. There really wasn’t any goal at all. Just being together was mission accomplished.

The athletic equivalent might be the 1992 U.S. Olympic “Dream Team” scrimmages, where Michael Jordan, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, Charles Barkley and other future Hall of Famers went up against each other away from television cameras. But even that was competition. These Nashville gatherings were fellowship, not gamesmanship.

As for a rock ’n’ roll equivalent, there’s probably not one.

There’s a good documentary called “Festival Express” about a train tour that featured The Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, The Band and others. But even there, performers were being paid to be on that train. Levon Helm’s “Midnight Ramble” shows at his Woodstock, N.Y., home were joyful confluences, but tickets were sold and the musicians were (rightly) interested in pleasing an audience.

Johnny and June Carter Cash used to host “guitar pulls” at their Hendersonville home, where Kris Kristofferson, Mickey Newbury, Joni Mitchell, George Hamilton IV, Gordon Lightfoot and many other writers came for music and hospitality.

John Hartford’s home on the banks of the Cumberland was home to epic New Year’s jams, and it may be that other groundbreaking musicians opened their homes for such sessions. (I’m told that musicians don’t always invite journalists to their big shindigs, though that’s difficult to believe.)

So what can we do about all this?

Well, I just got an email about someone’s rich uncle who died in Nigeria: Apparently, this guy needs my account information so that the uncle’s millions can be deposited in my name. If all that works out, I’m going to buy late Country Music Hall of Famer Cowboy Jack’s house — which has an upstairs recording studio built by the great Mark Howard — and revive it as a creative center, using Cowboy Jack’s motto as a mission statement: “We’re in the fun business. If we’re not having fun, we’re not doing our job.” All I need is a little more than $1.28 million.

You, dear reader, may purchase the Scruggs home, which in the past was also owned by the late fellow Country Music Hall of Famers — and former spouses — George Jones and Tammy Wynette.

Listed at $3.5 million, it is a gorgeous, rambling estate with room enough to invite dozens of musicians over to convene and collaborate. There’s a big iron gate out front, and I used to get giddy just watching from my driver’s seat when the thing opened: Driving through that gate was like passing through the turnstile on opening day of baseball season.

I’m counting hard on that rich Nigerian uncle money coming through, but if the real estate stuff doesn’t work out for us, maybe we can open our own homes.

Maybe we can visit each other in person, rather than just checking in through social media. Maybe bring-your-own-booze becomes bring-your-own-instrument (though it’s not an either/or: Instrument cases have lots of booze-hiding compartments).

Maybe we turn our houses into Nashville’s greatest music venues, just for the fun of it. Just because we can. Just because we’re Nashville, and our houses sound better than the houses in Wichita. We’re in the fun business, and it’s time to get to work.

With less than a week to go until Thanksgiving, it’s one of the busiest travel times of the year. As tons of holiday revelers make their way through Music City in the next week, so will more than a few music stars: rockers, rappers and country artists who are among the biggest names in their genres.

Nashville’s largest regular concert venue — Bridgestone Arena — is hosting four supersized concerts leading up to Thanksgiving Day, topping a list of musical offerings that includes several holiday concerts, club standouts and a honky-tonk block party on Lower Broad. Continue reading →

The inaugural concert — headlined by Middle Tennessee stars Alison Krauss and Jerry Douglas — will serve as a fundraiser for the association as well as a preview for 2014, when the festival plans to expand to an all-day event for an audience of 5,000 to 7,000, with multiple venues within The Factory and an outdoor main stage.

The announcement comes as the nonprofit trade association, which also presents the annual Americana Music Festival and Conference in Nashville in September, prepares to move its headquarters from Nashville to Franklin next month. Executive Director Jed Hilly says the new festival — aimed at the concert-going public — complements Nashville’s annual industry-heavy event, and one that has a fitting home outside of Music City.

“This music that has evolved from American roots traditions is something that needs to be shared, and something that we need to be proud of,” he says. “Cross County Lines is about breaking borders, breaking boundaries and coming together as a larger community.”

I got the word late that morning. I was sitting in a South Carolina hospital room, watching my father recover from a stroke, pleased that he’d just been told that he would be able to go home later that day.

A morning full of smiles and encouragement turned lousy as soon as I picked up my cell phone and heard about Mike. Dad understood: He was there the first time I heard Auldridge play, on my 15th birthday at a Northern Virginia listening room called The Birchmere.

I turned on my laptop and wrote an obit to send in to The Tennessean, taking care to write of Mike in the past tense, and to refer to him as “Mr. Auldridge.” In life, he’d recoil when people would call him Mr. Auldridge, but that Saturday he couldn’t do a thing about it.

I also took care to mention Mike’s major musical accomplishments, including transforming the Dobro — an odd, loud, rattling collision of metal and wood — into an instrument of grace and elegance, thus saving the instrument from creeping oblivion and inspiring every Dobro player who has come along after him. I mentioned his contributions to albums by Emmylou Harris, Linda Ronstadt, Patty Loveless and many others, and noted his role as founding member of groundbreaking bluegrass band The Seldom Scene.

I didn’t mention the ever-present crease in his jeans, or the way the stage lights shone off his Dobro, creating a poor man’s laser show. I didn’t mention the way his playing had welcomed me into a world of roots music when I was young. His tone was warm and lush, and he had no interest in a gymnastic, “watch what I can do” approach that was off-putting to me. Auldridge didn’t play to impress, he played to converse.

Mike Auldridge, whose sophisticated musicianship secured a place for the resophonic guitar — popularly called the Dobro — in contemporary music, died Saturday, Dec. 29 after a lengthy cancer battle at age 73. He was in hospice care, near his Silver Springs, Md., home.

Guthrie Trapp plays at The Station Inn. (photo: Larry McCormack / The Tennessean)

Eleven years and a lifetime ago, Guthrie Trapp walked into a music store in Pensacola, Fla., seeking strings or picks or just some time around guitars that he could ogle or play but not afford.

By then, Trapp was considered a special guitar player along his native Gulf Coast. He was a staple in area clubs, where tourists borrowed joined in the never-ending party for a week at a time, then passed it along to the next week’s renters, like runners pass a baton.

Trapp was tiring of that party the day he walked into that music store and heard another special guitar player through the store speakers. That player was Johnny Hiland, a legally blind, should-be-illegally talented musician who was then playing at Robert’s Western World on Lower Broadway, in The Don Kelley Band.

“I heard that CD and said, ‘Who the hell isthat?’ ” Trapp says. “That’s how I found out about Don Kelley. When I moved to Nashville (in 2001) and got an apartment at 17th and Horton, I started going to see Don. I’d stand by the door at Robert’s and just watch.”

For a guitar player new to Nashville, watching The Don Kelley Band is either inspiring or distressing or a bunch of both. Successful, masterful guitarists including Hiland, Brent Mason, Redd Volkaert and Kenny Vaughan have all logged time in Kelley’s combo, and Kelley never employs any musician of less than jaw-dropping abilities. (For more information, go hear Kelley with his current guitar star, J.D. Simo.)

Aspiring Music City guitarists head to Lower Broad and watch six-stringers of astounding abilities, playing for tips at a club with no cover charge. The lesson is a hard one: Perhaps one day, if I work hard enough, visualize success and plan each step of the way, I’ll someday be good enough to get a job scraping by in a Nashville honky-tonk.

But Guthrie Trapp neither visualized success nor planned ahead.

“I never had a plan,” says Trapp, who has indeed become a distinctive and celebrated instrumental voice in Nashville, a town that wasn’t exactly lacking for guitar players prior to his arrival. “I moved here not having a clue, or any vision for the future. Even now, people say, ‘What do you see yourself doing in two years?’ And I don’t know, at all.”

Learning from pros

After Hiland moved on, Trapp got the job as Kelley’s guitarist, staying for four years. and getting an education.

“That gig is where I learned to play country music,” says Trapp. He’d actually grown up around roots music, becoming enamored of bluegrass at an early age, but it was in the Kelley band that he learned from the inside out and found electric guitar tones that suited the style.

As a teenager, he played guitar and mandolin at songwriter festivals in Alabama and Florida, sitting in with Mickey Newbury, Hank Cochran, Red Lane and others, and he came to Nashville at age 18 to record with Gove Scrivenor on an album that featured Trapp, John Prine, Nanci Griffith and others. In those settings, he learned crucial lessons about what not to play.

“Being around people like Mickey Newbury and Red Lane, I was scared to death,” he says. “And I sure wasn’t going to play over the top of their singing. I thought, ‘If I do just one fill or solo, it’s going to be the most tasteful thing I can play.’ That was driven into my brain at a young age.”

And so Trapp developed a quality that’s rare among young virtuosos: restraint. He learned to play in a way that accentuated the song, rather than treating the song as a launching pad for a string-bending solo. Throw in four years of tips and toning in Kelley’s band, and Trapp became an extraordinary musician. He soon found national exposure in Patty Loveless’ band, and then worked for four years in The Jerry Douglas Band, collaborating as an equal with groundbreaking virtuoso Douglas.

“Playing with Jerry, I learned you can be a world-class musician and still not take this (stuff) so seriously to where it’s not any fun anymore,” Trapp says. “If you’re on a gig and it’s not any fun, you need to do something else. We might be opening for Paul Simon in a huge place, and Jerry would want to try new things and take chances. I guess I became known for backing myself right up to the edge, and barely catching things before they completely fall apart, and then bringing it all right back: Pushing it as far as we can, and then recovering.”

The one to watch

By the end of the new century’s first decade, Trapp had established himself as a distinctive and important instrumental voice in Nashville, both onstage and in the studio. His playing was (and remains) an unlikely combination of discretion and exploration, and he was versatile enough to work with an array of disparate talents, from acoustic music heroes Sam Bush and Tim O’Brien to soulful shouter Delbert McClinton.

Of late, he’s also formed three groups: The 18 South band with Jessi Alexander, Jon Randall Stewart, Jimmy Wallace, Larry Atamanuik and Mike Bub, the Guthrie Trapp Trio and TAR (Trapp, Pete Abbott and Michael Rhodes).

“He is a freak of nature known to those who excel in music as ‘the’ guy to watch in the next few years,” Douglas says in a statement offered up for Trapp’s website (www.guthrietrapp.com), which also boasts testimonials from folks including John Oates (“He is without a doubt one of the greatest soloists I’ve ever heard.”), O’Brien (“He’ll blow you away but he’ll never wear you out.”) and former NFL passing champ Kenny “The Snake” Stabler (“If I could play guitar like that, I would have never picked up a football.”).

Those comments were offered up in hopes of drumming up interest in Trapp’s brand-new, self-titled debut album, “Pick Peace,” the most expansive musical statement of his still young career. The album is not a country manifesto, it’s a ping-ponging ride through a variety of forms, including rock, blues, pop and jazz, with all the quirk and playfulness suggested by song titles such as “Monkey Bars,” “Mambo Cheeks, “Zim Zam Zoom” and “Huevos Al Gusto.”

It’s the kind of album one might come up with if one were an astonishing guitar player who entered the studio with intriguing riffs, grooves and melodies, and absolutely no plan.

“I figure, don’t fight it,” he says. “Just go with it. Find your place and be happy with it.”

The Gibson Brothers accept the award for Entertainer of the Year at the International Bluegrass Music Association Awards at the Ryman Auditorium on Thursday. Click image for more photos from the awards show. (Photo: Steven S. Harman/Tennessean)

Hope the folks in Raleigh, NC are happy for themselves. A bunch of them probably are, with good reason.

Because, after eight years in Music City, the International Bluegrass Music Association Awards are shipping off to Raleigh for at least the next three years, and Nashville will no longer be home to this annual showcase of virtuoso acoustic performers.

Thursday night’s 23rd annual awards show at the Ryman Auditorium took place on the stage where bluegrass music was born in 1945. It featured generations of bluegrass musicians delivering songs based in tradition yet geared for the new century.

“It was a quest for the best,” says Cook of the beginning stages of making “Uncaged,” which has sold more than 360,000 copies since it was released in July.

Cook says the band got the inspirational push a year ago when it went to the United Kingdom with Kings of Leon.

“They are playing to 90,000 people a night over there,” Cook says. “Hanging out with those guys and watching the fans’ reaction, I can’t explain what it did for us, but it was the turning point for the beginning of the record. We knew we needed to keep a little bit of that … how it made us feel to watch their fans react to their music over there.”

The result, Cook says, is “the best thing we’ve ever done.”

“We kind of knew that when we were sitting down and deciding the songs,” he says. “The entire time we were making the record, we felt like we were already doing a good job. On the last record, a lot of the songs we’d been playing for two or three years already. This one, maybe one or two songs we played for more than two months. This one is us hunkering down and making a record out of nothing.

“I think we made the best record we could have made and that this is a great snapshot of us as a live band as well.”

Cook says the band had piles of music to sort through when choosing songs for the album, but admits even that wasn’t too hard.

“I think it’s pretty clear what makes the cut,” he says. “It only gets hard when you get to songs nine and 10. ... There’s a handful of really terrible songs we have written that no one will ever hear. But it’s those songs that make us realize which ones to put on the record. Really, it’s like picking kids at dodge ball. You’re going to pick the best athletes at first and then you start using strategy towards the end.”

Whatever the plan, it appears to have worked.

Zac Brown Band’s lead single from the album, “The Wind,” is approaching the Top 10 on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart, and the album is back on top of the Billboard 200 chart, which lists the top-selling albums in all genres.